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Tag: Courts Reform (Scotland) Act 2014

The rules of interpretation in public law, though apparently of little interest to academic lawyers, and never taught in law schools, are fundamental to the day-to-day work of anyone practising in the area.

This is not only because most public authorities operate within a statutory framework which must be properly understood if they are to act intra vires, but because they themselves generate huge volumes of written documents – orders, directions, regulations, consents, licences, authorisations, policies, approvals, determinations, guidance (and so on) – all of which fall to be interpreted within a public law context.

Because public law is, as Martin Loughlin of the LSE observes, ‘an autonomous discipline with its own distinctive methods and tasks’, its principles of interpretation differ in important respects from those applying to private law documents. In two cases decided on the same day, the Supreme Court has emphasised four important elements of these principles.